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Crytek still planning retail games ahead of F2P switch

Crytek has spoken before about its hopes for free-to-play, hoping to escape the conventional retail model and solely make free-to-play games. The Crysis developer doesn't feel quite ready to make the switch yet but whether it takes two years or five, CEO Cevat Yerli has said, free-to-play will rival retail and Crytek will be there.

Crytek has spoken before about its hopes for free-to-play, hoping to escape the conventional retail model and solely make free-to-play games. The Crysis developer doesn't feel quite ready to make the switch yet but whether it takes two years or five, CEO Cevat Yerli has said, free-to-play will rival retail and Crytek will be there.

Crytek is ploughing ahead with free-to-play on PC with multiplayer FPS Warface and its F2P platform Gface. Consoles are far behind with F2P, though.

"So we have quite a few console titles in our pipeline that are [traditional retail games] while we investigate free-to-play on consoles," Yerli told VentureBeat. "But our primary goal is to make triple-A free-to-play games for the world market and transition entirely to that."

Yerli isn't sure whether that'll happen in two to three years or more like five, VB says.

Crytek also considered turning the multiplayer sides of Crysis 2 and 3 free-to-play, but ultimately didn't. Yerli has also idly pondered the possibility of a TimeSplitters on Gface too.

Gface is a social media platform for free-to-play games, with cloud gaming, video chat, and other shiny web 2.0 features meant to encourage sharing and discovery. It's a bit weird, designed for a market which doesn't seem to exist quite yet, but Crytek believes in it.

"If we could launch our games on a platform that already exists today, and we could get the same results, then we wouldn't build our own platform," Yerli said. "But we're convinced that our platform does some particularly new things that makes our games behave better. That's why we plan to offer this service to third parties."

A free-to-play Crytek, then: coming to a video gaming device near you at some point.